As a human, we can hear the siren of an emergency vehicle approaching and take action (pull over, do not proceed into intersection etc) well before the emergency vehicle gets to us. How do autonomous vehicles such as those from Waymo/Cruise do this? Do they only take action when they “see” the blinking lights? Could a tow truck or other maintenance vehicle with orange blinking lights fool a autonomous vehicle into thinking it was an emergency vehicle?
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They don’t really. They have to see them. At least for now.
As far as being confused, probably not. Emergency vehicles have pretty distinct types of lights from a tow truck, and AI stuff is generally pretty good at this kind of simple A or B type of classification.
But also people don’t just pull over when they hear a siren. They look for where it’s coming from and take action appropriately once they see it. Pulling over onto a shoulder for example might end up blocking the vehicle. People will still go through an intersection, just with more caution, and stop if they do see an emergency vehicle coming. And emergency vehicles slow before intersections to make sure drivers can see them before going through a light.
Autonomous vehicles are looking 360 degrees 100% of the time. They don’t need a reminder to look behind, or pay more attention at an intersection, so they are generally pretty OK , at least in theory compared to human drivers.
Right now though really the issue isn’t so much detection, it’s appropriate response.
There’s stacks of training data available for normal driving. But much less so for unusual situations such as coordinating with other drivers to clear a lane. A person can make a judgement call if they really need to pull off into the grass, and if doing so is gonna run them into a ditch, if they can wait for other drivers to pull out instead, if the need to inch into an intersection to clear room, etc. Autonomous vehicles just don’t have that kind of decision making capacity. Yet.
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